How to Recruit Owner Operators – You have been doing it wrong!

I am sure if you are an owner operator recruiter then you have all seen the below advertisements.

Owner Operator Trucking Jobs Available
Owner Operators Wanted
Jobs Owner Operators
Owner Operator Opportunities

Let me ask you something, how have all these owner operator jobs advertisements worked out for you?

My guess is not great, you need advertisements in order to get calls, we get that but then what?

Here’s where most recruiters make a mistake when it comes to recruiting owner operators. They look at owner operator recruiting like a single event.

What do I mean by a single event? I mean most people look at owner operator recruiting like they would selling a table, a car, a couch or even a house. They just run an advertisement and then wait. They expect potential owner operators to call them and they start over every time they run a new advertisement.

Most owner operators recruiters do not build on their previous recruiting efforts, they just cruise right along with their current advertisements and wait for calls.

We are not going to talk about different ways to recruit owners operators in this article, no this article is about the process of recruiting owner operators. We will discuss recruitment methods another time because they are less important than the process itself.

If you want to take advantage of your current advertisements and build your recruiting efforts over time you have to change the way you think about the owner operator recruitment process.

Trucking jobs for owner operators are everywhere out there if you want to get a head of the vast number of companies running those owner operator needed advertisements then you have come to the right place.

Ok, we said you needed to re-think the process. So, what do we mean by that. It is very simple. Go speak with your best customer salesperson. Find out how they do customer sales. Find out what it takes to close a new customer and maintain them once you have them.

The secret to successful owner operator recruiting is simply treating the recruitment process like a very good salesperson would recruit customers.

The first thing you need is a good customer relationship manager (CRM) program to help you keep up with all of your owner operator contacts. If you company does not already have one there are a number of options out there that work very well at different price options.

Different CRM programs have different features, you might have to play with a couple to find the one that gives you the features and reporting that you want. The size of you recruitment team makes a difference, you need a CRM program that lets all of your recruiters use the same program and database.

The CRM should give the recruitment manager overall access to everything while limiting the access between individual recruiters. This will help avoid controversy when you have aggressive (a good thing) recruiters. The CRM should give the manager the ability to add tasks as well as reassign owner operator contacts when necessary.

The CRM should have sufficient reporting capability in order to keep up with number of new owner operator contacts coming in as well as the daily tasks and notes accomplished by each recruiter.

There are two primary inexpensive CRM programs we like. One is Zoho.com and the other is Pipedrive.com. These are inexpensive and easy to use. Zoho has better reporting but Pipedrive is more user friendly. If your company already has access to a program like Salesforce.com then you already have a more expensive program available for use. Salesforce is a very good CRM if you have access to it.

Once you get your CRM set up, it is just a matter of adding each new owner operator that calls in into the program and updating as new contacts are made. You can set up tasks (emails, calls, etc…) with the dates they should be accomplished and by whom.

Over time you will build a huge owner operator database that you can periodically call if they do not sign on initially to see if they are ready to make a change. You can also use the follow up feature to have your recruiters periodically check in on owner operators that did join your company.

It is ALWAYS good to have someone other than operations and safety reach out to your owner operators periodically to see how things are going. This is the best recruitment tool, NOT LOSING YOUR EXISTING OWNER OPERATORS!

Never EVER forget about the owner operators you already have. It is easy to keep what you have than replace or recruit new owner operators.

 

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